


Reel Talk

by FireKing



Series: Reel Talk Starring Pearl And Marina [1]
Category: Splatoon
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Lesbian Cephalopods (Splatoon), Post-Octo Expansion DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 09:17:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17999078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireKing/pseuds/FireKing
Summary: After their most successful concert ever, it's finally time for Pearl and Marina to talk about their emotions.Off The Hook had a live performance in Japan in late January 2019. You can watch it on Nintendo's official YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGZW_Uvhvvk. It's a legitimately amazing show, so good that it inspired me to write this. Most of what they talk about in this fic is stuff that actually happened during the show.I pulled a lot from the Octo Expansion as well, which is absolutely necessary to play if you own Splatoon 2.I hope you enjoy!





	Reel Talk

All good things must come to an end. With that thought in mind, Pearl and Marina waved their goodbyes to the screaming crowd and walked backstage, away from the light of waving glow sticks and pleas for another encore. Marina swept Pearl up in her arms the very second they were out of eyesight. They each said something, but the deafening noise of the crowd drowned their words. By this point, they knew each other well enough not to need words to communicate, though. They nodded at each other and, as much as it hurt them to do so, as much as it pained them to walk away from the thousands of reasons they were even able to stand on a stage in the first place, they continued their trek into the dregs of the arena.

Marina seated herself across from a vanity and began to methodically remove her makeup. Pearl paced around the green room, still a bundle of nervous energy despite leaving everything on stage, so to speak. They were silent for a while, Marina focusing on her breathing and Pearl entirely in her own head, replaying every moment when the crowd’s screams were at their loudest.

It was of course Pearl who broke the silence with a scream. Not out of fear or joy or any one specific emotion—sometimes Pearl screamed in the same way a tea kettle whistled.

“I can’t believe it went that well! Well, maybe I can believe it, since we’re both so great and all, but still!” Pearl said, ever the type of person who made sure you could hear her exclamation points. “I can _still_ hear the crowd!”

It was true: although the crowd was still screaming in the arena, the barriers between there and the green room muffled their noise to a still-audible but dull roar. Marina dabbed under her eyes with a cotton ball.

“I’m honestly still trying to process it,” Marina said. “It was such a rush.”

Unlike Pearl, who was capable of rattling off words as if they were shots of ink coming out of a Heavy Splatling, Marina was far more measured, choosing her words as carefully as if she were firing them from a Splat Charger.

“Yeah! It was our first time performing some of those songs live, huh?” Pearl asked, watching Marina nod as she wiped her face clean with a wet cloth. “I can’t wait to watch the recording. We knocked them all out of the park!”

“Amazing what happens when we actually hold rehearsals,” Marina teased, her heart finally slowing to a rate where she no longer felt as if it were about to burst from her chest. “I’m grateful we took it as seriously as we did. This was Off the Hook’s first headlining show, after all.”

Pearl blinked, realizing Marina was right. Thousands of thoughts had been zipping in and out of her head, but none of them had been the realization that this was Off the Hook’s first performance outside Inkopolis without the Squid Sisters receiving equal billing. Every single person in that crowd was there for them. Pearl knew that. But the fact that every single person in that crowd was there for _them_ , that was different. Pearl, for the first time in hours, sat down.

“Wow,” she said, looking up at the ceiling as she tilted her head back, her crown sliding off of it and clattering against the ground. She was so lost in thought that she made no move to stop that from happening. It rattled and spun before finally coming to a rest, at which point Pearl saw fit to continue.

“You’re right,” she said. “This was all Off the Hook. I mean, we had our backing musicians, but still. They really were all there to see us, huh?”

Marina stood and walked to where Pearl’s crown had fallen, picking it up and turning it over in her hands as she responded.

“It’s humbling, isn’t it?” Marina said. “Even outside Inkopolis people know us and love us.”

 She stared at the crown for a bit, running her thumb across the jewels that encrusted it. She smiled.

“I mean, how could they not love you?” she added. “You have so much energy and stage presence. It’s hard not to get a little jealous sometimes.”

She gently set the crown down on the vanity. Pearl’s jaw dropped.

“You? Jealous of me? Please! I know I have a,” Pearl paused to find an appropriate word, “distinctive voice, but yours, Marina, yours is so pretty! So beautiful! Not to mention you’re working the turntables _and_ the keytar!”

She wiggled her feet as she sat, since of course they did not touch the ground.

“I wonder if there’s anything you can’t do,” she added.

Marina raised her eyebrows at the praise before turning away, her dark skin flushing an undercurrent of green.

“Well, I can’t imagine commanding the audience as well as you do,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. “You had them in the palms of your hands. Every time I’m the center of attention I kind of have to pretend like it’s just the two of us.”

At that, Pearl seemed to make a connection and she leaned forward with a mischievous grin on her face, resting her chin on her steepled fingers.

“I’ve always wondered why your eyes are closed so often on stage,” she said. Marina gave a sheepish nod as she turned back to face Pearl.

“I try to keep them open when it matters, like when I’m watching you,” she said, still blushing. Her eyes darted away as she remembered a moment from earlier in the night. She took a deep breath before speaking about it.

“The crowd sure went wild when we got close that one time,” Marina added.

Of course, Pearl knew exactly the moment that Marina was talking about. After all, every swell in the crowd’s noise was recorded in her mind like a waveform. Her favorite thing about performing live was looking back at the moments that the crowd got the loudest. She even once said that the only thing she didn’t like about performing live was that she couldn’t be in the audience for her own shows. Early in her career, in the shows she’d play before meeting Marina at the clubs that didn’t feel well-lit no matter how bright the lights were, she tried to crowdsurf as often as she could. Now, it wasn’t so realistic, but it was still a fond memory. Now that she had someone to share the stage with, the stage was a sacred place that she didn’t dare leave.

“I think the only time they were any louder was after our costume change.”

Her chin still rested on her steepled fingers, but she tilted her head and her eyes drifted to the side. She wrestled with a few emotions but continued talking before she could pin any of them down.

“But as much as I loved that second entrance,” Pearl said, “I think that moment you’re talking about was my favorite moment.”

She paused again, a thought having formed in her head that she ejected out before she had a chance to think twice.

“I wish it could have lasted forever.”

It was unusual for Pearl to be so unguarded like this. Her nervous energy from earlier had settled into a quiet introspection. Her legs weren’t even twitching, and her eyes stared off into space, not focusing on anything in the room but trying to recall a memory, further back than minutes, hours, or even days. Marina had seated herself on the chaise lounge, hands folded politely on her lap as she listened intently to her partner.

“Tonight was the first time we ever played Into The Light live,” Pearl said, as if she was realizing it herself. “It always catches me off guard how emotional that song is.”

Into The Light was their newest song; it hadn’t even been released as a single yet. Marina smiled, bowing her head slightly.

“It _is_ a ballad, Pearlie.”

“I know that!” Pearl said, locking eyes with Marina and pouting. “But look, you weren’t the only one holding back tears tonight.”

As usual, Marina’s first instinct was to tease Pearl. A thought drifted through her head— _It’s hard to imagine you crying over something that’s not losing a video game_. But she could tell that Pearl wasn’t joking about this. It wouldn’t be right to be the one to joke about it. Instead, Marina looked across the room at Pearl.

“We sure packed a lot of emotion into that song, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. We wrote it because we wanted to write a song about everything Eight went through,” Pearl said, looking away from Marina’s gaze. “I guess it became a bit more than that.”

This was actually a familiar sight to Marina, Pearl receding into her shell, but for the first time in their long partnership Marina saw fit not to let it happen. Rather than say anything, she simply patted the spot next to her on the chaise. Pearl, in uncharted waters for the first time that she could remember, almost didn’t understand what Marina was offering at first. Eventually, though, she heaved herself off of the chair and walked over to the chaise, sitting next to Marina.

“Eight wasn’t the only Octoling to see the light,” Marina said, turning to Pearl and wearing that warm, reassuring smile. “I saw it too, way back on Mt. Nantai.”

Pearl folded her arms, unsuccessfully trying to hold back a blush.

“So what, was I your light?”

All Marina could do was cover her mouth with her hand and laugh.

“Well, yes,” she said. “Maybe it was the Squid Sisters who showed me that music was meant to be liberating and not controlling, but it was you who actually had the patience to listen to me.”

She blinked a few times, feeling the tears start to well up again before she went on.

“You were the first person I met as myself, as Marina, as my own person.”

Pearl bowed her head and closed her eyes in thought.

“I still don’t know how you even managed to find my secret practice spot,” she said.

The tears Marina had been trying to hold back were buffeted by a sudden bout of laughter.

“Oh, Pearlie, your practice screams echoed for _miles_! I simply had to find out who they were coming from!”

Now Pearl laughed, too.

“You’re one to talk! I found you click-clacking away at one of my old, broken keyboards! I thought you were a squatter!”

“Well, I kind of was. I didn’t have anywhere to live! Maybe you should be more concerned about leaving all your broken instruments on top of a mountain!”

“I’m returning them to nature!”

By now they were both laughing raucously, and Pearl actually fell over on top of Marina, tears streaming down her cheeks, at first because she was laughing so hard but slowly, though the tears stayed the same, the reason for them changed. Pearl was finally letting herself feel. The levity of the moment meant that there was no nervousness as Marina wrapped her arms around Pearl, no apprehension as Pearl let Marina pull them closer together, and no questioning that each of them was exactly where they wanted to be: with one another. Pearl clasped her hands on top of Marina’s.

“You wanna know a secret?”

“I didn’t think you were the type to keep secrets, Pearlie.”

Absentmindedly tracing over the back of Marina’s palm with her fingers (since at least one part of Pearl’s body always had to be moving, moving, moving at any given time), Pearl spoke openly about her insecurities for the first time.

“You know my parents. Everyone does. They’re one of the richest families in Inkopolis. Growing up, if there was something I wanted, they could make it happen. It was like magic. But when I started getting older, getting into music, I started to realize something. No one was ever going to judge me fairly if they knew who I was. All the haters would say I just bought my fame, and all the leeches would suck up to me to try to get a cut of my cheddar.”

“Those underground shows,” Marina said, weaving her fingers though Pearl’s and gripping them tightly.

“I could be whoever I wanted to be. I didn’t have to be Pearl Pygmy, heiress to the family fortune. I could actually _earn_ my fame. I could show I was deserving of all those big crowds. People would chant my name because they loved me, not because they wanted to get on my good side.”

“Pearl, I never knew. All this time?”

Still reclining against Marina, Pearl nodded.

“That’s why- it’s why I warmed up to you so quickly. You were completely foreign to Inkopolis.”

As if realizing something, Marina responded, “I had no idea who you were…”

For a split second, Pearl felt Marina’s grip loosen, but rather than tighten her own hold, Pearl flipped herself over to face Marina, her tears flowing and her eyes pleading.

“I never for a minute tried to take advantage of you, Marina. But it was so refreshing to meet someone who knew nothing about me. I could be Pearl and not my parents’ daughter!”

Pearl grabbed Marina’s hands again, willing herself to maintain eye contact.

“I could make something _real_ with you! I was your light, sure, but you were my light, too!”

Marina had fantasized about doing what came next in her weaker moments. Their faces were close enough at this point that it was easy for Marina to close her eyes, lean her face up, and press her lips against Pearl’s. They were a pair of idols, yes, but Pearl had been an idol for Marina in a different way. Never before this night had Marina seriously entertained the thought of jeopardizing their working relationship for something more. They loved each other, sure, there was no question about that. But the idea of being in love with one another was scary, though each of them had entertained the thought. Sometimes it was a daydream during rehearsal, or a reverie that kept one of them lying awake at night. Never did either of them picture anything like this, sobbing in each other’s arms in the green room after a concert.

After a few seconds, they broke, falling into each other’s arms, at first panting and then laughing.

“Was that…?”

“Yeah.”

“Mine too.”

“I could tell.”

They laughed even more, although they didn’t need the laughter for the tears to flow freely.

“We’ll have to write a song about this.”

“What should we call it?”

Some silence, and then simultaneously:

“Reel Talk.”


End file.
